Saturday, June 4, 2016
A Wise Shopper hr570
I’m always impressed by the size of houses that appear in TV shows and
movies of U.S. Even when the setting is for a poor family, they live in a
mansion by Japanese standards. That’s why the story is often confusing
when the house tries to tell how much its inhabitants go through
hardship. Japanese people live in tiny space as much, including myself
of course. One of my favorite pastimes is bargain-hunting. I like
searching for goods that are marked down by 80 percent or more and
getting them. When I’m out for a store, I keep my eyes peeled for a cart
or shelves of bargain items and pounce on like a hyena. Those items
usually have a small sticker of the discounted price over the price tag
where the list price had been shown. Some of them have a layer of
numerous stickers as they got discounted more and more repeatedly. I
peel the sticker off carefully to look at the former list price and to
see how much it’s reduced. Sometimes the reduction is huge, which means I
hit the jackpot. Imagining there are people who got it at the list
price, I feel like I’m a wise shopper and it would be foolish if I
didn’t get it. So I buy things dirt cheap, most of which are clothes.
Back in my apartment, I squeeze the catch into my closet. The closet is
already full with those discounted items and hangers are no longer
necessary for my clothes because they are sandwiched each other too
tightly to drop. I use many cardboard boxes to store my stuff that make
my tiny apartment even smaller. My apartment doesn’t have a walk-in
closet, but it seems like my apartment itself has turned into one and I
live inside it. I can’t throw them away because it would make a profit
of a discount a loss. A number of my cardboard boxes are growing and I
don’t catch up. I can’t find one particular item when I really need it.
Although I know I have gotten it and stowed somewhere, I rummage around
and just can’t find it. And that item shows up from somewhere when I
least need it. And it’s gone again somehow when I need it. As I repeat
that, I can’t tell why and what for I got it in the first place. The
other day, I made a firm resolution to clear some space in my apartment
by putting my stuff in order closely. It was a troublesome job but I
tried to make my apartment bigger and look better. It worked to some
degree and my living environment was improved a little. Only a few days
later, I needed a scarf when I was going out. And I couldn’t remember
which cardboard box I had stored my scarves in and where I put the box. I
again pulled back out numerous boxes and opened them. I couldn’t find
it. All my scarves that I had collected through the years by
bargain-hunting was sucked into a black hole in the galaxy far, far away
and disappeared. I wonder how many years will pass until I see them
again…